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A suitable birthday present?

What can you give the person who has everything? Imagine someone who knows you really well and who loves you and who has invited you to their party. Of course you would want to go, and you would hope to take them a present they would really appreciate. But what?

This person has everything. This person needs nothing and wants nothing—or at least nothing you buy in a shop or on line.
They don’t wear clothes or read books, they don’t eat luxury foods or drink fine wines (or single malt whisky). They never take a holiday and they don’t drive a car. They don’t even own a DVD player. So what can you give them?
If you think that’s a bit of a poser, it gets worse ….. because this person isn’t actually a person at all . . I’m talking about God.
From earliest times people have struggled to come to terms with the fact that there is absolutely NOTHING that God needs.

God doesn’t need animal sacrifices. God doesn’t need buildings or institutions or money or statues or beautiful fabrics or music or windows. (We need some of these things, because some of us find them helpful when we worship, but that is our need, not God’s)
God is SPIRIT, free from any sort of need that we can understand except one. God needs us. We are His creatures, each of unique and all of us necessary if God is to interact with us and with the rest of creation, because it is by breathing His Spirit into us that we can make things happen as part of the physical world we share with each other and with Him.

Clearly God doesn't even need a birthday .. since being eternal means there is no anniversary of your beginning … however “Whit Sunday”, or “Pentecost” is the birthday of the Church. It was on that day that God’s Spirit filled the first disciples, who described the experience as being like an outpouring of the breath of God upon them, with burning flames which didn’t burn them up but which set their hearts aflame with passion for the Gospel.

That powerful experience kick-started the formation of the first “church”. A group of confused individuals fused by the flames into a community dedicated to carrying on the work begun by Jesus.
God needed them to work with Him and for Him in their time, in their world. He needs you to be part of the church in our time , in our world. That is the only present you can give Him.

Come to church on Pentecost, Sunday May 11th, it’s His party—and you are His present!

                                           Judith